Working with a touchscreen can somewhat emulate real objects — and now MyPublisher says its iPad app that “mimics the natural feeling of moving pictures around a page to make an album. KeepShot lets creativity flow naturally from your fingertips, instead of from steering a curser with a mouse.”

MyPublisher has provided custom photo books since 1994. “Photo books have been a popular way for people to print, preserve and share photos of important life events for almost 20 years,” the company says, “but KeepShot enables users to design photo books with their fingertips through simple touch gestures like dragging, pinching and tapping photos.”

Editing photos on an iPad’s touchscreen can be fun, or it can make you curse your big clumsy fingers. But the $80 Pogo Connect stylus offers full pressure sensitivity, and the patent-pending technology in its Crescendo Sensor makes the stylus tip highly responsive to pressure, recognizing even the slightest touch.

“With zero grams of activation force, Crescendo Sensor works at all angles and requires absolutely no calibration, providing hundreds of levels of pressure,” says developer Ten One Design.

The stylus supports the updated Adobe Photoshop Touch app for drawing atop a photo, and pairs with the iPad over Bluetooth 4.

Perhaps now not all iPad users will look quite akward as they take photos using their tablet computers: the new iPad mini small and light enough to be held and used with one hand — “as thin as a pencil and as light as a pad of paper,” Apple says.

The iPad mini features a front-facing HD camera and a 5-megapixel camera on the back “with advanced optics for taking sharp still pictures and recording full 1080p HD video,” the company says. The iSight camera includes video image stabilization, and both cameras feature backside illumination “to let users capture great pictures in low light.”

The mini’s 7.9-inch display has the same number of pixels as the original iPad and iPad 2. The device is housed in aluminum and glass that is 7.2mm thin and weighs only 0.68 pounds — 23 percent thinner and 53 percent lighter than the third generation iPad. iPad mini pricing starts at $330. More information is here.

Also newly announced: the fourth generation iPad has a faster processor that delivers up to twice the CPU performance and up to twice the graphics performance of the previous model [which this reporter bought just a few short months ago…]. The iPad starts at $500.

“With vivid colors, razor sharp text and more pixels than anyone else’s 15 or 17-inch notebooks, the Retina display completely changes what you expect from a notebook.”

That what Apple has to say about its new 13-inch MacBook Pro, which adds a Retina display. The new MacBook Pro packs more than 4 million pixels into its display, Apple says, nearly twice the number of pixels in an HD television. At 227 pixels per inch, the Retina display’s pixel density is “so high the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels at a normal viewing distance, so images look sharp and text looks like it does on the printed page,” Aple adds. “With four times the pixels of the current 13-inch MacBook Pro, you can view and edit video in pixel-accurate HD and see a new level of detail in high resolution images.” Also, the display has IPS technology for a 178-degree wide viewing angle, and has 75 percent less reflection and 29 percent higher contrast than the current generation.

The laptop has all-flash storage in a new compact design that is 0.75 inches thick and 3.57 pounds — 20 percent thinner and almost a pound lighter than the current model. It has an HD camera and dual microphones. Pricing starts at $1,700. More information is here.

And finally: the new iMac also features a brilliant display, Apple says, as well as stunning new design that is “unbelievably thin” — the aluminum and glass enclosure has 40 percent less volume than its predecessor, and an edge that measures 5mm thin… all while housing a full-powered computer in the display case.

The new iMac features a completely reengineered display that reduces reflection by 75 percent while maintaining brilliant color and contrast, Apple says. In the new design, the cover glass is fully laminated to the LCD and an anti-reflective coating is applied using a high-precision plasma deposition process. Every iMac display is individually calibrated using an advanced spectroradiometer, the company adds.

Another new feature is Fusion Drive, a storage option that gives the performance of flash storage and the capacity of a hard drive, Apple says. It combines 128GB of flash with a standard 1TB or 3TB hard drive to create a single storage volume that “intelligently manages files to optimize read and write performance. Fusion Drive adapts to the way you use your iMac and automatically moves the files and apps you use most often to flash storage to enable faster performance and quicker access.”

Pricing starts at $1,300 for the 21.5-inch iMac, and $1,800 for the the 27-model.

Recognizing that the iPad is being used as a camera as well as a photo organizer, app developer tap tap taphas revamped its leading iPhone shooter for the bigger screen with Camera+ for iPad.

“Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or someone who’s barely touched a camera, Camera+ will give you the tools to create the best quality images,” the company says. “Transform your photos with our advanced editing features, one-tap dazzling effects, and easily share them with friends and family.”

The iCloud sync feature syncs photos between all of devices, so users can “shoot all day on your iPhone, and then edit all night on your iPad.”

Also new on the iPad version are effects “you can brush on (or off) with your finger, so you apply it only where you want.” Users can set the brush size, softness and intensity.

“Recent announcements of Google’s Nexus 7 and Microsoft’s Surface tablets have led many observers to conclude that the tablet device market will see many changes in the months to come as these three major players battle for market share. Photo and video apps could become one of the major product areas that they leverage to differentiate their tablets. Hence, we thought it helpful to zoom in on what type of photo and video apps are most successful on the most popular tablet thus far, i.e. the iPad and what type of characteristics set the more successful apps apart from others,” says 6Sight’s Joe Byrd. “We’ve asked market researcher and long-term 6Sight associate, Hans Hartman, to create a special version of his recently conducted Photo/Video App Market Analysi,s which focuses on the findings specific to the iPad photo and video app market.”

eMarketer said the number of iPad users in the United States will rise by over 90 percent this year to 53.2 million, as loyal users replace older models and new consumers purchase the device. This year, the iPad will continue to be in the hands of more than three-quarters of all tablet users in the country.

That level of growth is down significantly from last year’s 143.9 percent jump, and will continue to decline; by 2015, the number of iPad users will rise by just under 12 percent. By then, more than one-third of all U.S. Internet users will have such a device.

A new app “elevates the way iPad users interact with images by enabling the creation of high-quality, customizable digital photo books that can easily be given to others,” says publisher 58 North. “We take many photos daily but some are special and deserve to be preserved and shared — whether it’s to tell a story or remember an important event.”

With the $10 Pholium, developed by Bottle Rocket Apps, users can create digital books, fine-tune the images, and gift the completed photo books to others “for a fraction of the cost of a printed book,” the company says. If they’re bits instead of pages, why do they cost anything? Well, the purchase price allows the creation of an unlimited number of books — but it’s limited to give each book to 10 recipients; additional “Pholdas” are $1 each, “and enable users to give each digital photo book to up to 10 new recipients,” the company adds.

Featured item:

In January, during the PMA 2015 Conferences, Gabrielle Mullinax of Fullerton Photo became president of PMA – where in the past month, a new CEO has been installed and a new management company has been hired to help create fresh growth and opportunities for PMA and its members. In this episode of the PMA Podcast, [...]